Shaun Deeb Wins WSOP $25,000 High Roller PLO for Second Time and Fifth Career Bracelet

Shaun Deeb won his fifth World Series of Poker gold bracelet on Saturday, October 30, at the 2021 WSOP. Deeb finished atop the 212-entry field in Event #53: $25,000 High Roller Pot-Limit Omaha for what was his second time winning the event. This time, Deeb picked up a $1,251,860 first-place prize.

Deeb’s five gold bracelets are part of his laundry list of poker titles, which includes more than $9,000,000 in live tournament earnings. This victory, even though he’s been there before, was up near the top of Deeb’s list of accomplishments, he said, largely due to the difficulty of his competition.

“It’s definitely up there,” Deeb said of where this victory ranked among all of his other accolades in poker. “This was a super, super tough final table. I was probably one of the least experienced PLO players. I’m the more experienced tournament player, but it was very unique dynamics. They all played very differently versus me, and they all have very different images of me. I definitely had to splash a lot and I was trying different sizings. Usually, I have my one set plan, but I really kept trying to switch it up on these guys and figure out what worked best versus them. Just running them over and making the nuts a bunch is just the way to go.”

Deeb won the same event in 2018 for what was his third WSOP gold bracelet win at the time. For that win, Deeb earned $1,402,683 and the victory helped propel him to become the 2018 WSOP Player of the Year. With the victory in this year’s event, Deeb moved to fourth place on the 2021 WSOP Player of the Year leaderboard. To date, he has nine cashes, two final tables, and one victory at the 2021 WSOP.

“Now I’m going to start multi-tabling,” Deeb said of chasing another WSOP Player of the Year title. “I really took it easy so far. Yesterday, I was talking to Cliff Josephy when we bagged and said that I really want to go play the $10K Six-Max. He said, ‘You can’t,’ and I said, ‘I know, but I really fucking want to.’ That’s the other event I won in 2018. It’s a great event, but it’s so brutal to multi-table that and blind out. I knew the tables would be close, and I knew I could easily be out of the PLO quickly, but I also didn’t want to have it hover over me to have that stack. So I didn’t burn that equity, but for the rest of the year, you’re going to see me firing pretty hard.”

Deeb is now among a group of 28 players with at least five WSOP gold bracelets. The sky is the limit, though, and Deeb is confident that one day he’ll catch Phil Hellmuth.

“Oh, I’m going to pass Phil Hellmuth eventually,” Deeb said. “It’s going to take me a while, but I’m going to pass Phil. He’s a great player when he’s sharp, but he can’t play every day like me. When he wins a bracelet, he’s not hopping in the next event like I’m going to do, and that’s going to help me out. Plus, I think online I’m a stronger player and there are so many more online bracelets. I’m going to catch him one day. It’s going to take me a decade or two, but I’ll be there.”

Deeb came into the final day of player fourth in chips with five players remaining from the 212-entry field. The final five took their seats on the PokerGO WSOP feature table stage for the finale of the tournament that was live streamed on PokerGO. On the first hand of play, Deeb doubled up through Maxx Coleman and was off and running.

It wasn’t long after his double on the first hand of the day that Deeb knocked out Veselin Karakitukov in fifth place. Shortly after that, Deeb moved into the chip lead. After that, Deeb busted Coleman in fourth place and then the battle between Deeb, Ka Kwan Lay, and John Beauprez was on.

The first two eliminations of the day came quick, but it took a bit longer for the third-place finisher to be found. That was John Beauprez and he was also eliminated by Deeb.

Deeb began heads-up play against Lau with about a 3-to-1 chip lead. Lau did his best to close the gap, but Deeb’s chip lead was never really in question. On the final hand, Deeb’s full house defeated Lau’s trip eights to give Deeb the title.

“It feels great,” Deeb said. “It’s such a high buy-in. I final tabled a couple of years before I won it, and it’s such a big equity difference. I came into today having locked up $270K being four of five and now I won $1.25 million. That’s a million-dollar swing, that’s just crazy that it can happen in a few hours and that’s why I think people will always love tournament poker.”

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